Council services and the NHS should be run for the benefit of the public – not
for their staff.

What struck me about Nick Robinson's entertaining article in yesterday's Daily Telegraph describing the travails of a neighbourhood where all council amenities had been withdrawn was what was missing. The BBC's political editor has made a documentary, to be broadcast next Monday, The Street That Cut Everything. It assumes that if the local authority pulled back, then people would be forced to clear away their own rubbish, ensure the street lights work and look after elderly residents. Robinson's conclusion is that they would find this far more difficult than might be imagined and would, as a result, see politicians in a more benign light.

In a six-week experiment, the residents of the street were reimbursed their council tax for the duration, "to spend not on themselves but on the needs of their community". But in truth, most people would consider that clearing rubbish away or ensuring the streets are well lit is spending money on themselves. Community spirit is not necessarily altruistic; it can be an aggregation of self-interest. Indeed, surely the most likely consequence of what the BBC proposes is not endless street meetings about who does what but the involvement of the private sector. Seeing the chance to make money, an enterprising businessman would set up a company called something like Street Clear to carry out the tasks that need to be done but which the residents do not have time to do themselves. People would be billed monthly by the firm. If it failed to do the job properly or efficiently, then another company called Down My Road would step in to offer a better service.

You can hear the appalled intake of breath now. The privatisation of public services – whatever next? There is a default position in our culture that public delivery is somehow good and private bad. The row over NHS reforms has become a variation on this familiar theme, played out so many times over the past three decades. Nick Clegg – who has somehow contrived to interpret last Thursday's election trouncing as a mandate for Lib Dem policies – vowed yesterday to "protect the NHS from the profit motive". Ed Miliband, the Labour leader, said the country did not want "a free market free-for-all" in the NHS – what he really meant was no private sector involvement at all.

If you want an idea of how obtuse this is, imagine the same thing being said about the production and supply of food. Consider if we had to shop in state-run outlets and had to queue for essential provisions because they were expensive and rationed. Then, while on holiday abroad, we found ourselves in a highly profitable supermarket called, let's say, Tesco, where the shelves were always well stocked, prices low and supply seemingly unlimited. Who would then argue that we should stick with our model because it is run by the state? Surely there would be a clamour for the one that works better? If, furthermore, we found out that the reason our shops were so poor is because they were badly managed, and that those who might run them better were never asked their opinion about how to improve things, would we not get angry about such a state of affairs?

Yet where the public services are concerned we are supposed to accept the overmanning, inefficiency and excessive cost of state delivery, because to use the expertise of the private sector to bring about improvements might involve – shock, horror – someone making money. What is it about our amenities that makes them uniquely deliverable only by a public sector monopoly? And why is our political discourse unable to sustain a serious and grown-up debate about the efficacy of profit-making in providing health care or education? After all, independent schools and private hospitals work on this basis and very fine institutions they often are – if you can afford them, that is. Some councils also contract out services to commercial enterprises. But to suggest that this should be the rule rather than the exception is to invite the political roof to fall on your head.

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Take the experience of Andrea Hill, chief executive of Suffolk county council. She wanted to establish a "virtual" local authority where most or all of its services would be run by private firms or social enterprises and charities. This would have meant job losses – but they would soon be reversed as private companies moved in to take up the reins, made money, reinvested it and employed more people. As Mrs Hill put it: "We are developing a new model that will unsettle the status quo… Changing the system challenges vested interests and will therefore be attacked." Well, she was right about that – and the idea has been dumped. How dare she try to develop a radical new way of delivering services that might actually benefit the people who use them, rather than those who run them.

With the NHS, we have been here so many times. The Wanless report nearly a decade ago documented how Britain's health system produced some of the worst outcomes in the developed world – bizarrely only to conclude that it was the best model on offer. We are fixated in this country with the method of delivery rather than whether it works. Essentially, our politicians would rather waste billions of pounds of our money than be given a hard time by Nick Robinson.